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FIFTY COPIES PRINTED 
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FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION 



MEMORIALS OF 
TWO FRIENDS 



1 










MEMORIALS 






OF 






TWO FRIENDS 






JAMES RUSSELL 






LOWELL: 1819-1891 






GEORGE WILLIAM 






CURTIS : 1824-1892 






NEW YORK 






PRIVATELY PRINTED 






M C M I I 













^, 






COPYRIGHT, 1892, 
BY HARPER AND BROTHERS 

COPYRIGHT, 1888, 
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

COPYRIGHT, 1900, 

BY CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 






NOTE 

" Like the old hand-grasp, when at Shady Hill 
We met, " — 

SO wrote Lowell to Curtis. Hap- X 

pily their host is still at Shady 
I Hill, and to these " Memorials 
of Two Friends" he has kindly 
consented to add his Ashfield address 
on George William Curtis. 

For permission to print the address 
on James Russell Lowell I am indebted 
to the courtesy of Messrs. Harper & 
Bros. Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 
granted the privilege of using "An 
Epistle to George William Curtis.'' 

E. B. H. 



CONTENTS 

James Russell Loweli i 

By George William Curtis 

An Epistle to George William 

Curtis 55 

By James Russell Lowell 

The Life and Character of George 

William Curtis 69 

By Charles Eliot Norton 



JAMES RUSSELL 
LOWELL 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
AN ADDRESS BY 
GEORGE WILLIAM CUR IIS 
FEBRUARY TWENTY-SECOND 
MDCCCXCII 



THE birthday of Washington 
not only recalls a great his- 
toric figure, but it reminds 
us of the quality of great 
citizenship. His career is at once our 
inspiration and our rebuke. Whatever 
is lofty, fair and patriotic in public con- 
duct, instinctively we call by his name ; 
whatever is base, selfish, and unworthy, 
is shamed by the lustre of his life. Like 
the flaming sword turning every way 
that guarded the gate of Paradise, 
Washington's example is the beacon shin- 
ing at the opening of our annals and 
lighting the path of our national life. 

But the service that makes great citi- 
zenship is as various as genius and tcm- 
3 



MEMORIALS OF 

perament. Washington's conduct of the 
war was not more valuable to the country 
than his organization of the Government, 
and it was not his special talent but his 
character that made both of those serv- 
ices possible. In public affairs the gla- 
mour of arms is always dazzling. It is the 
laurels of Miltiades, not those of Homer, 
or Solon, or Gorgias, which disturb and 
inspire the young Themistocles. But 
while military glory stirs the popular 
heart, it is the traditions of natural gran- 
deur, the force of noble character, im- 
mortal works of literature and art, which 
nourish the sentiment that makes men 
patriots and heroes. The eloquence of 
Demosthenes aroused decadent Greece 
at least to strike for independence. The 
song of Koerner fired the resistless charge 
of Liitzow's cavalry. A pamphlet of our 
Revolution revived the flickering flame 
of colonial patriotism. The speech, the 
song, the written word, are deeds no less 
than the clash of arms at Chseronea and 
Yorktown and Gettysburg. 
4 



TWO FRIENDS 

It is not only Washington the soldier 
and the statesman, but Washington the 
citizen, whom we chiefly remember. 
Americans are accused of making an ex- 
cellent and patriotic Virginia gentleman a 
mythological hero and demi-god. But 
what mythological hero or demi-god is a 
figure so fair? We say nothing of him 
to-day that was not said by those who 
saw and knew him, and in phrases more 
glowing than ours, and the concentrated 
light of a hundred years discloses nothing 
to mar the nobility of the incomparable 
man. 

It was while the personal recollections 
and impressions of him were still fresh, 
while, as Lowell said, "Boston was not 
yet a city and Cambridge was still a 
country village," that Lowell was born in 
Cambridge seventy-three years ago to- 
day. His birth on Washington's birth- 
day seems to me a happy coincidence, 
because each is so admirable an illustra- 
tion of the two forces whose union has 
made America. Massachusetts and Vir- 



M K M () R I A L S O F 

ginia, although of very different origin and 
character, were the two colonial leaders. 
In Virginia politics, as in the aristocratic 
salons of Paris on the eve of the French 
revolution, there was always a theoretical 
democracy ; but the spirit of the State 
was essentially aristocratic and conserva- 
tive. Virginia was the Cavalier of the 
Colonics, Massachusetts was the Puritan ; 
and when .lohn Adams, New Fngland per- 
sonitied,said in the Continental Congress 
that Washington ought to be General, 
the Puritan and the Cavalier clasped 
hands. The union of Massachusetts and 
Virginia for that emergency foretold the 
final union of the States, after a mighty 
travail of dilfercncc, indeed, and long 
years of stritc. 

The higher spirit of conservatism, its 
reverence for antiquity, its susceptibility 
to the romance of tradition, its instinct 
for continuity and development, and its 
antipathy to violent rupture; the grace 
and charm and courtesy of established 
social order, in a word, the feminine ele- 
6 



1 W O F R I K N D S 

ment in national life, however far from 
actual embodiment in Virginia or in any 
colony, was to blend with the masculine 
force and creative energy of the Puritan 
spirit and produce all that we mean by 
America. I'his was the consummation 
which the Continental Congress did not 
see, but which was none the less forecast 
when John Adams summoned Washing- 
ton to the chief revolutionary command. 
It is the vision which still inspires the life 
and crowns the hope of every generous 
American, and it has had no truer inter- 
preter and poet than Lowell. Well was 
he born on the anniversary of Washing- 
ton's birth, for no American was ever 
more loyal to the lofty spirit, the gran- 
deur of purpose, the patriotic integrity 
which invest the name of Washington 
with imperishable glory; and none ever 
felt more deeply the scorn of ignoble and 
canting Americanism. 

The house in which Lowell was born 
has long been known as Elmwood, a 
stately house embowered in lofty trees, 
7 



MEMORIALS OF 

still full, in their season, of singing birds. 
It is one of the fine old mansions of which 
a few yet linger in the neighborhood of 
Boston, and it still retains its dignity of 
aspect, but a dignity somewhat impaired 
by the encroaching advance of the city 
with its display of the architectural taste 
of a later day. The house has its tradi- 
tions, for it was built before the Revolution 
by the last loyal Lieutenant-governor of 
Massachusetts, whose stout allegiance to 
the British crown was never shaken, and 
who left New England with regret when 
New England, also not without natural 
filial regret, left the British empire. It is 
a legend of Elmwood that Washington was 
once its guest, and after the Revolution it 
was owned by Elbridge Gerry, a signer of 
the Declaration of Independence, who oc- 
cupied it when he was Vice-president. 

Not far from Elmwood, LowelTs life- 
long home, is the house which is doubly 
renowned as the headquarters of Wash- 
ington and the home of Longfellow. 
Nearer the colleges stands the branching 
8 



TWO FRIENDS 

elm — twin heir with the Charter Oak of 
patriotic story — under which Washington 
took command of the revolutionary army. 
Indeed, Cambridge is all revolutionary 
ground, and rich with revolutionary tra- 
dition. Lexington common is but six 
miles away. Along the West Cambridge 
road galloped Paul Revere to Concord. 
Yonder marched the militia to Bunker 
Hill. Here were the quarters in which 
Burgoyne's red-coats were lodged after 
the surrender at Saratoga. But peaceful 
among the storied scenes of war stands 
the University, benign mother of educated 
New England, coeval with the Puritan 
settlement which has given the master 
impulse to American civilization. 

The American is fortunate who, like 
Lowell, is born among such historic scenes 
and local associations, and to whose cra- 
dle the good fairy has brought the gift of 
sensitive appreciation. His birthplace 
was singularly adapted to his genius and 
his taste. The landscape, the life, the fig- 
ures of Cambridge constantly appear both 
9 



M K M () U I A L S O F 

in his prose and verse, but he hiys Httle 
stress upon its historic reminiscences. It 
is the picturesqueness, the character, the 
humor of the Hfe around him which at- 
tract him. This apparent inditlerence to 
the historic charm of the neighborhood 
is ilkistrated in a httle story that Lowell 
tells of his first visit to the White Moun- 
tains. In the Franconia Notch he stopped 
to chat with a recluse in a saw-mill busy 
at work, and asked him the best point of 
view for the Old Man of the Mountain. 
The busy workman answered, "Dun no; 
never see it." Lowell continues, "Too 
young and too happy to feel or alfect the 
Horatian inditVerence, I was sincerely 
astonished, and 1 expressed it. I'he log- 
compelling man attempted no justifica- 
tion, but after a little asked, 'Come from 
Baws'n ?' ' Yes ' (with peninsular pride). 
'• Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Baws'n ?' 
'Oh, yes!' I said. 'I should like, 'awl 
I should like to stan' on Bunker Hill. 
You've ben there o fie n, likely?' 'No-o,' 
unwillingly, seeing the little end of the 

10 



r w () F K I i: N n s 

horn in clear vision at the terminus of 
this Socratic perspective. ' 'Aw4, my 
young frien', youVe larned ncow thet 
wut a man kin see any day he never doos 
see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vally.' " 

Lowell entered college at fifteen and 
graduated at nineteen, in 1838. His lit- 
erary taste and talent were already evi- 
dent, for in literature even then he was an 
accomplished student, and he was the poet 
of his class, although at the close of his 
last year he was rusticated at Concord, — 
a happy exile, — where he saw Himerson, 
and probably Henry Thoreau and Mar- 
garet Fuller, who was often a guest in 
Emerson's house. It was here that he 
wrote the Class poem which gave no 
melodious hint of the future man, and 
disclosed the fact that this child of Cam- 
bridge, although a student, was as yet 
wholly uninfluenced by the moral and 
intellectual agitation called, derisively, 
Transcendentalism. 

Of this agitation John Quincy Adams 
writes in his diary in 1840: "A young man 
1 1 



MEMORIALS OF 

named Ralph Waldo PZmerson, a son of 
my once-loved friend William Emerson, 
and a classmate of my lamented son 
George, after failing in the every day 
avocation of a Unitarian preacher and 
school-master, starts a new doctrine of 
transcendentalism; declares all the old 
revelations superannuated and worn out, 
and announces the approach of new rev- 
elations and prophecies. Garrison and 
the non-resistant Abolitionists, Brownson 
and the Marat Democrats, phrenology 
and animal magnetism all come in, fur- 
nishing each some plausible rascality as 
an ingredient for the bubbling cauldron 
of religion and politics/' There could be 
no better expression of the bewildered 
and indignant consternation with which 
the old New England of fifty years ago 
regarded the awakening of the newer 
New England, of which John Quincy 
Adams himself was to be a characteristic 
leader, and which was to liberalize still 
further American thought and American 
politics, enlarging religious liberty, and 



TWO FRIENDS 

abolishing human slavery. Like other 
Boston and Harvard youth of about his 
time, or a Httle eadier, — Charles Sumner, 
Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Loth- 
rop Motley, Oliver Wendell Holmes, — 
Lowell seemed to be born for studious 
leisure or professional routine, as yet un- 
heeding and unconscious of the real forces 
thatw^ere to mould his life. Of these forces 
the first and the most enduring was an 
early and happy passion for a lovely and 
high-minded woman who became his 
wife — the Egeria who exalted his youth 
and confirmed his noblest aspirations ; a 
heaven-eyed counsellor of the serener air 
who filled his mind with peace and his 
life with joy. 

During these years Lowell greatly im- 
pressed his college comrades, although 
no adequate literary record of the prom- 
ise which they felt survives. When he 
left college and studied law the range of 
his reading was already extraordinarily 
large, and his observation of nature sin- 
gularly active and comprehensive. His 
13 



MEMORIALS OF 

mind and memory, like the Green Vaults 
of Dresden, were rich with treasures accu- 
mulated from every source. But his ear- 
liest songs echoed the melodies of other 
singers and foretold no fame. They were 
the confused murmuring of the bird while 
the dawn is deepening into day. Partly 
his fastidious taste, his conservative dis- 
position, and the utter content of happy 
love, lapped him in soft Lydian airs which 
the angry public voices of the time did 
not disturb. But it was soon clear that 
the young poet whose early verses sang 
only his own happiness would yet fulfill 
Schiller's requirement that the poet shall 
be a citizen of his age as well as of his 
country. 

One of his most intimate friends, the 
late Charles F. Briggs, for many years a 
citizen of Brooklyn, and known in the lit- 
erary New York of forty years ago as 
Harry Franco, said of him, with fine in- 
sight, that Lowell was naturally a politi- 
cian, but a politician like Milton — a man, 
that is to say, with an instinctive grasp of 



TWO FRIENDS 

the higher politics, of the duties and re- 
lations of the citizen to his country, and 
of those moral principles which are as es- 
sential to the welfare of States as oxygen 
to the breath of human life. "He will 
never narrow himself to a party which 
does not include mankind,'' said his friend, 
" nor consent to dally with his muse when 
he can invoke her aid in the cause of the 
oppressed and suflFering." This was the 
just perception of aflfectionate intimacy. 
It foretold not only literary renown but 
patriotic inspiration, and consequent po- 
litical influence in its truest and most 
permanent form. In Lowell's mind, as in 
Milton's, the spirit of the question of 
Sir Philip Sidney to Hubert Languet 
presently roused a quickening glow : " To 
what purpose should our thought be 
directed to various kinds of knowledge, 
unless room be aflforded for putting it 
into practice so that public advantage 
may be the result ? " It was not a Puritan 
nor a republican who wrote the words, 
but they contain the essential spirit of 
15 



MEMORIALS OF 

Puritan statesmanship and scholarship 
on both sides of the ocean. 

The happy young scholar at Elmwood, 
devoted to literature and love, and un- 
heeding the great movement of public af- 
fairs, showed from time to time that be- 
neath the lettered leisure of his life there 
lay the conscience and moral virility that 
give public effect to genius and accom- 
plishment. LowelFs development as a 
literary force in public affairs is uncon- 
sciously and exquisitely portrayed in the 
prelude to Sir Launfal in 1848: — 

" Over his keys the musing organist 
Beginning doubtfully and far away, 
First lets his fingers wander as they list, 
And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his 
lay ; 
Then as the touch of his loved instrument 
Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his 
theme. 
First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent 
Along the wavering vista of his dream." 

In 1844-45 his theme was no longer 
doubtful or far away. Although Mr. Gar- 
16 



TWO FRIENDS 

rison and the early abolitionists refused 
to vote, as an act sanctioning a govern- 
ment which connived at slavery, yet the 
slavery question had already mastered 
American politics. In 1 844 the Texas con- 
troversy absorbed public attention, and in 
that and the following year Lowell's po- 
ems on Garrison, Phillips, Giddings, Pal- 
frey, and " On the Capture of Fugitive 
Slaves near Washington," like keen flashes 
leaping suddenly from a kindling pyre, an- 
nounced that the antislavery cause had 
gained a powerful and unanticipated ally 
in literature. These and other of his 
poems, especially that on "The Present 
Crisis," have a Tyrtaean resonance, a 
stately rhetorical rhythm, that make their 
dignity of thought, their intense feeling, 
and picturesque imagery, superbly effect- 
ive in recitation. They sang themselves 
on every antislavery platform. Wendell 
Phillips winged with their music and tipped 
with their flame the darts of his fervid ap- 
peal and manly scorn. As he quoted them 
with suppressed emotion in his low, me- 
17 



M P: M O R I A L S OF 

lodious, penetrating- voice, the white 
plume of the resistless Navarre of elo- 
quence gained loftier grace, that relent- 
less sword of invective a more flashing 
edge. 

The last great oration of Phillips was 
the discourse at Harvard University on 
the centenary of the Phi Beta Kappa. It 
w^as not the least memorable in that long 
series of memorable orations at Harvard 
of which the first in significance was 
Buckminster's in 1809, and the most fa- 
miliar was Kdward h^verett's in 1824, its 
stately sentences culminating in the mag- 
nificent welcome to Lafayette, who was 
present. It was the first time that Phil- 
lips had been asked by his Alma Mater to 
speak at one of her festivals, and he 
rightly comprehended the occasion. He 
was never more himself, and he held an 
audience culled from many colleges and 
not predisposed to admire, in shuddering 
delight by the classic charm of his man- 
ner and the brilliancy of his unsparing 
censure of educated men as recreant to 
18 



T W (3 FRIENDS 

political progress. The orator was nearly 
seventy years old. He was conscious 
that he should never speak again upon a 
greater occasion nor to a more distin- 
guished audience, and as his discourse 
ended, as if to express completely the 
principle of his own life and of the cause 
to which it had been devoted and the 
spirit which alone could secure the happy 
future of his country if it was to justify 
the hope of her children, he repeated the 
words of Lowell : 

'■'■ New occasions teach new duties ; Time makes 
ancient good uncouth ; 

They must upward still, and onward, who 
would keep abreast of Truth ; 

Lo, before us gleam her camp tires! we our- 
selves must pilgrims be. 

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly 
through the desperate winter sea, 

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the 
Past's blood-rusted key." 

When Lowell wrote the lines he was 
twenty-five years old. He was thorough- 
ly stirred by the cause which Edmund 

19 



MEMORIALS OF 

Quincy in reply to Motley's question, 
"What public career does America of- 
fer?" had declared to be "the noblest in 
the world." But Lowell felt that he was 
before all a poet. When he was twenty- 
seven he wrote : " If I have any vocation 
it is the making of verse. When I take 
my pen for that, the world opens itself un- 
grudgingly before me; everything seems 
clear and easy, as it seems sinking to the 
bottom would be, as one leans over the 
edge of his boat in one of those clear 
coves at Fresh Pond. But when I do 
prose it is invita Minerva. I feel as if I 
were wasting time and keeping back my 
message. My true place is to serve the 
cause as a poet. Then my heart leaps be- 
fore me into the conflict." Already the 
musing organist had ceased to dream, and 
he was about to strike a chord in a 
strange and unexpected key, and with a 
force to which the public conscience 
would thrill in answer. 

Lowell was an intense New Englander. 
There is no finer figure of the higher 
20 



TWO FRIENDS 

Puritan type. The New England soil 
from which he sprang was precious to 
him. The New England legend, the New 
England language, New England charac- 
ter and achievement, were all his delight 
and familiar study. Nobody who has 
attempted to depict the Yankee ever knew 
him as Lowell knew him, for he was at 
heart the Yankee that he drew. The 
Yankee early became the distinctive rep- 
resentative of America. He is the Uncle 
Sam of comedy and caricature. Even the 
sweet-souled Irving could not resist the 
universal laugh, and gave it fresh occasion 
by his portrait of Ichabod Crane. Those 
who preferred the cavalier and courtier 
as a national type, traced the Yankee's 
immediate descent from the snivelling, 
sanctimonious, and crafty zealots of Crom- 
well's parliament. Jack Downing and 
Sam Slick, the coarser farces and stories 
broadly exaggerated this conception, and, 
in our great controversy of the century, 
the antislavery movement was derided 
as the superserviceable, sneaking fanati- 



MEMORIALS OF 

cism of the New England children of 
Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-in-the- 
land-Busy, whom the southern sons of 
gallant cavaliers and gentlemen would 
teach better morals and manners. The 
Yankee was made a byword of scorn, and 
identified with a disturber of the national 
peace and the enemy of the glorious 
Union. Many a responsible citizen, many 
a prosperous merchant in New York and 
Boston and Philadelphia, many a learned 
divine, whose honor it was that they were 
Yankees, felt a half-hearted shame in the 
name, and grudged the part played by 
their noses in the conversation. They 
seemed perpetually to hear a voice of con- 
tempt saying, "Thy nose bewrayeth 
thee." 

This was the figure which, with the in- 
stinct of genius, with true New England 
pride and the joy of conscious power, 
Lowell made the representative of liber- 
ty-loving, generous, humane, upright, 
wise, conscientious, indignant America. 
He did not abate the Yankee a jot or a 



TWO FRIENDS 

tittle. He magnified his characteristic 
drawl, his good-natured simplicity, his 
provincial inexperience. But he revealed 
his unbending principle, his supreme good- 
sense, his lofty patriotism, his unquailing 
courage. He scattered the clouds of 
hatred and ignorance that deformed and 
caricatured him, and showed him in his 
daily habit as he lived, the true and 
worthy representative of America, with 
mother wit preaching the gospel of Christ, 
and in plain native phrase applying it to 
a tremendous public exigency in Chris- 
tian America. The Yankee dialect of 
New England, like the Yankee himself, 
had become a jest of farce and extrava- 
ganza. But, thoroughly aroused, Lowell 
grasped it as lightly as Hercules his club, 
and with it struck a deadly blow at the 
Hydra that threatened the national life. 
Burns did not give to the Scottish tongue 
a nobler immortality than Lowell to the 
dialect of New England. 

In June 1846, the first Biglow paper, 
which, in a letter written at the time, 
23 



M E M O R I A L S OF 

Lowell called "a squib of mine,'' was pub- 
lished in the Boston Courier. That squib 
was a great incident both in the history 
of American literature and politics. The 
serious tone of our literature from its 
grave colonial beginning had been al- 
most unbroken. The rollicking laugh of 
" Knickerbocker" was a solitary sound in 
our literary air until the gay note ot 
Holmes returned a merry echo. But humor 
as a literary force in political discussion 
was still more unknown, and in the fierce 
slavery controversy it was least to be an- 
ticipated. Banter in so stern a debate 
would seem to be blasphemy, and humor 
as a weapon of antislavery warfare was 
almost inconceivable. The letters of Ma- 
jor Jack Downing, a dozen years before 
the Biglow Papers^ were merely political 
extravaganza to raise a derisive laugh. 
They were fun of a day and forgotten. 
Lowell's humor was of another kind. It 
was known to his friends, but it was not 
a characteristic of Lowell the author. In 
his early books there is no sign of it. It 
24 



TWO FRIENDS 

was not a humorist whom the good- 
natured WilHs welcomed in his airy way, 
thinking, perhaps, that another dainty and 
graceful trifler had entered the charmed 
circle of literature that pleases but not 
inspires. 

But suddenly, and for the first time, 
the absorbing struggle of freedom and 
slavery for control of the Union was il- 
luminated by a humor radiant and pierc- 
ing, which broke over it like daylight, and 
exposed relentlessly the sophistry and 
shame of the slave power. No speech, no 
plea, no appeal was comparable in popu- 
lar and permanent effect with this pitiless 
tempest of fire and hail, in the form of 
wit, argument, satire, knowledge, insight, 
learning, common-sense, and patriotism. 
It was humor of the purest strain, but 
humor in deadly earnest. In its course, 
as in that of a cyclone, it swept all before 
it — the Press, the Church, criticism, schol- 
arship, and it bore resistlessly down upon 
the Mexican War, the pleas for slavery, 
the Congressional debates, the conspicu- 
25 



M i: M () R I A L S () F 

ous public men. Its contemptuous scorn 
of the public cowardice that acquiesced 
in the aq-gressions of the slave power 
startled the dormant manhood of the 
North and of the country. 

'' ' The North hain't no kind o' bisncss with 
nothin', 
An' you've no idee how much bother it saves; 
We ain't iumic riled by their frettin' and 
trot hill'. 
We're nscJ lo Javin' the siring on our shives,' 
Sez .U)hn C]. C.ann)un, sez he ; — 
Sez Mister Foote, 
' 1 siiould like to shi)ot 
The holl i;anu, bv the i;reat horn spoon! ' sez he. 

" ' The mass ough' to labor an' we lay on st)thes, 
Thet's the reason 1 want to sjMead Free- 
dom's aree ; 
It puts all the cunninest on us in othce, 

An' reelises our Maker's orij^'nal idee,' 
Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
' Thet's ez plain,' sez Cass, 
' As thet some one's an ass, 
It's ez clear ez the sun is at noi>n,' sez he. 

'" 'Now don't i;o to sav Fm the triend o[ op- 
pression, 

26 



r W () K H I K N D S 

l>ui keep all your spare hrcaih fcr coolin' 
your broih, 
Fcr I oilers jicv strove fai least thet's my im- 
pression) 
To make cussed free with the rights o' the 

North; 
Sez John C Calhoun, sez he; — 
' Yes,' sez Davis o' Miss., 
'I'he perfection o' bliss 
Is in skinnin' thei same old coon,' sez he." 

Such lines, as with a stroke of h'^ht- 
nin^r, were l)Lirnet] into the hearts and con- 
science of the North. Read to-day, they 
recall, as nothin^^ else can recall, the in- 
tensity oF the feeling which swiftly flatned 
into civil war. 

Apart from their special impulse and 
influence, the Billow Papers were essen- 
tially and purely American. It is some- 
times said that the best American poetry 
is only luij^lish poetry written on this side 
of the ocean. i>ut the Hi^lojv Papers are 
as distinctively American as"'ram o'Shan- 
ter" is Scotch, or the " Divine (>omedy ' 
Italian. They could have been written 
nowhere else but in Yankee New I']n^land 
27 



MEMORIALS OF 

by a New England Yankee. With Uncle 
Tom's Cabin, they are the chief literary 
memorial of the contest — a memorial 
which, as literature, and for their own de- 
light, our children's children will read, as 
we read to-day the satires that scourge 
the long-vanished Rome which Juvenal 
knew, and the orations of Burke that dis- 
cuss long-perished politics. So strong was 
Lowell's antislavery ardor that he proudly 
identified himself with the Abolitionists. 
Simultaneously with the publication of 
the first series of the Biglojv 'Papers, he 
became a corresponding editor with Ed- 
mund Quincy of the Anti-Slavery Stand- 
ard, the organ of the American Anti- 
slavery Society, and in a letter to his 
friend, Sydney Howard Gay, the editor of 
the paper, he says : " I was not only will- 
ing but desirous that my name should 
appear, because I scorned to be indebted 
for any share of my modicum of popular- 
ity to my abolitionism, without incurring 
at the same time whatever odium might 
be attached to a complete identification 
28 



TWO P^RIENDS 

with a body of heroic men and women 
whom not to love and admire would 
prove me to be unworthy of those senti- 
ments, and whose superiors in all that 
constitutes true manhood and woman- 
hood I believe never existed." 

But his antislavery ardor was far from 
being his sole and absorbing interest and 
activity. Lowell's studies, more and more 
various and incessant, were so compre- 
hensive that he took, if not like Bacon, 
all knowledge, yet all literature for his 
province, and in 1855 he was appointed 
to the chair of modern languages and 
belles-lettres in Harvard University, suc- 
ceeding Longfellow and Ticknor, an illus- 
trious group of American scholars which 
gives to that chair a distinction unparal- 
leled in our schools. His love and mastery 
of books were extraordinary, and his de- 
votion to study so relentless, that in those 
earlier years he studied sometimes four- 
teen hours in the day, and pored over 
books until his sight seemed to desert 
him. And it was no idle or evanescent 
29 



MEMORIALS OF 

reading. Probably no American student 
was so deeply versed in the old French 
romance, none knew Dante and the Ital- 
ians more profoundly ; German literature 
was familiar to him, and perhaps even 
Ticknor in his own domain of Spanish 
lore was not more a master than Lowell. 
The whole range of English literature, 
not only its noble Elizabethan heights, 
but a delightful realm of picturesque and 
unfrequented paths, were his familiar park 
of pleasance. 

Yet he was not a scholarly recluse, a 
pedant, or a bookworm. The student 
of books was no less so acute and 
trained an observer of nature, so sym- 
pathetic a friend of birds and flowers, so 
sensitive to the influences and aspects of 
out-of-door life, that as Charles Briggs 
with singular insight said, that he was 
meant for a politician, so Darwin with 
frank admiration said, that he was born 
to be a naturalist. He was as much the 
contented companion of Izaak Walton 
and White of Selborne as of Donne or 
30 



TWO FRIENDS 

Calderon. His social sympathies were no 
less strong than his fondness for study, 
and he was the most fascinating of com- 
rades. His extraordinary knowledge, 
whether of out-door or of in-door deri- 
vation, and the racy humor in which his 
knowledge was fused, overflowed his con- 
versation. There is no historic circle of 
wits and scholars, not that of Beaumont 
and Ben Jonson where, haply, Shake- 
speare sat, nor Dryden's, nor Pope's, nor 
Addison's, nor Dr. Johnson's Club, nor 
that of Edinburgh, nor any Parisian salon 
or German study, to which Lowell's abun- 
dance would not have contributed a gold- 
en drop and his glancing wit a glittering 
repartee. It was not of reading, merely, 
it was of the reading of a man of Lowell's 
intellectual power and resource that Ba- 
con said, " reading maketh a full man." 
He had said in 1846 that it was as a 
poet that he could do his best work. But 
the poetic temperament and faculty do 
not exclude prose, and like Milton's swain, 
"he touch'd the tender stops of various 
31 



MEMORIALS OF 

quills." The young poet early showed 
that prose would be as obedient a familiar 1 
to his genius as the tricksy Ariel of verse. » 
Racy and rich, and often of the most so- 
norous or delicate cadence, it is still the 
prose of a poet and a master of the diflfer- 
ences of form. His prose, indeed, is often 
profoundly poetic — that is, quick with im- 
agination, but always in the form of prose, 
not of poetry. It is so finely compact of 
illustration, of thought and learning, of 
wit and fancy and permeating humor, 
that his page sparkles and sways like 
a phosphorescent sea. "Oblivion," he 
says, "looks in the face of the Grecian 
muse only to forget her errand." And 
again : " The garners of Sicily are empty 
now, but the bees from all climes still 
fetch honey from the tiny garden-plot 
of Theocritus." Such concentrated sen- 
tences are marvels of felicity, and, al- 
though unmetred, are as exquisite as 
songs. 

Charles Emerson said of Shakespeare, 
"he sat above this hundred-handed play 
32 



TWO FRIENDS 

of his imagination pensive and conscious," 
and so Lowell is remembered by those 
who knew him well. Literature was his 
earliest love and his latest delight, and 
he has been often called the first man of 
letters of his time. The phrase is vague, 
but it expresses the feeling that while he 
was a poet and a scholar and a humor- 
ist and a critic, he was something else 
and something more. The feeling is per- 
fectly just. Living all summer by the sea, 
we watch with fascinated eyes the long- 
flowing lines, the flash and gleam of mul- 
titudinous waters, but beneath them all 
is the mighty movement of unfathomed 
ocean, on whose surface only these undu- 
lating splendors play. Literature,whether 
in prose or verse,was the form of Lowell's 
activity, but its master impulse was not 
aesthetic but moral. When the activities 
of his life were ended. In a strain of clear 
and tender reminiscence he sang : 

" I sank too deep in the soft-stuffed repose 
That hears but rumors of earth's wrongs and 
woes ; 

33 



MEMORIALS OF 

Too well these Capuas could my muscles 

waste, 
Not void of toils, but toils of choice and taste; 
These still had kept me could I but have quelled 
The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled." 

Literature was his pursuit, but patriot- 
ism was his passion. His love of country 
was that of a lover for his mistress. He 
resented the least imputation upon the 
ideal America, and nothing was finer than 
his instinctive scorn for the pinchbeck 
patriotism which brags and boasts and 
swaggers, insisting that bigness is great- 
ness, and vulgarity simplicity, and the will 
of the majority the moral law. No man 
perceived more shrewdly the American 
readiness of resource, the Yankee good- 
nature, and the national rectitude. But 
he was not satisfied with an easy stand- 
ard. To him the best, not the thriftiest, 
was most truly American. Lowell held 
that of all men the American should be 
master of his boundless material re- 
sources, not their slave; worthy of his un- 
equalled opportunities, not the syco- 
34 



TWO FRIENDS 

phant of his fellow Americans nor the 
victim of national conceit. No man re- 
joiced more deeply over our great achieve- 
ments or celebrated them with ampler or 
prouder praise. He delighted with Yan- 
kee glee in our inventive genius and rest- 
less enterprise, but he knew that we did not 
invent the great muniments of liberty, — 
trial by jury, the habeas corpus, constitu- 
tional restraint, the common school, — of 
all which we were common heirs with civil- 
ized Christendom. He knew that we have 
Niagara and the prairies and the Great 
Lakes, and the majestic Mississippi ; but 
he knew also with another great Ameri- 
can that 

" Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone. 
And morning opes with haste her Hds 
To gaze upon the pyramids." 

As he would not accept a vulgar carica- 
ture of the New Englander as a Yankee, 
so he spurned Captain Bobadil as a type 
of the American, for he knew that a na- 
35 



MEMORIALS OF 

tion may be as well-bred among nations 
as a gentleman among gentlemen, and 
that to bully weakness or to cringe to 
strength are equally cowardly, and there- 
fore not truly American. 

Lowell's loftiest strain is inspired by 
this patriotic ideal. To borrow a German 
phrase from modern musical criticism, it 
is the kit ;7/o/// which is constantly heard 
in the poems and the essays, and that in- 
spiration reached its loftiest expression, 
both in prose and poetry, in the discourse 
on Democracy and the Commemoration 
ode. The genius of enlightened Greece 
breathes audibly still in the oration of 
Pericles on the Peloponnesian dead. 
The patriotic heart of America throbs 
forever in Lincoln's Gettysburg address. 
But now^here in literature is there a more 
magnificent and majestic personification 
of a country whose name is sacred to its 
children, nowhere a profounder passion 
of patriotic loyalty, than in the closing 
lines of the Commemoration ode. The 
American whose heart, swayed by that 
36 



TWO FRIENDS 

lofty music, does not thrill and palpitate 
with solemn joy and high resolve, does 
not yet know what it is to be an Ameri- 
can. 

Like all citizens of high public ideals, 
Lowell was inevitably a public critic and 
censor, but he was much too good a Yan- 
kee not to comprehend the practical con- 
ditions of political life in this country. 
No man understood better than he such 
truth as lies in John Morley's remark : 
" Parties are a field where action is a long 
second best, and where the choice con- 
stantly lies between two blunders.'' He 
did not therefore conclude that there is 
no alternative, that "naught is every- 
thing and everything is naught.'' But he 
did see clearly that while the government 
of a republic must be a government of 
party, yet that independence of party is 
much more vitally essential in a republic 
than fidelity to party. Party is a servant 
of the people, but a servant who is foolish- 
ly permitted by his master to assume 
sovereign airs, like Christopher Sly, the 

37 



MEMORIALS OF 

tinker, whom the Lord's attendants ob- 
sequiously salute as master : 

" Look how thy servants do attend on thee, 
Each in his office ready at thy beck." 

To a man of the highest public spirit like 
Lowell, and of the supreme self-respect 
which always keeps faith with itself, no 
spectacle is sadder than that of intelli- 
gent, superior, honest public men pros- 
trating themselves before a party, profess- 
ing what they do not believe, affecting 
what they do not feel, from abject fear 
of an invisible fetich, a chimera, a name, 
to which they alone give reality and force, 
as the terrified peasant himself made the 
spectre of the Brocken before which he 
quailed. The last great patriotic service 
of Washington, and none is more worthy 
of enduring commemoration on this anni- 
versary, was the Farewell Address with 
its strong and stern warning that party 
government may become a ruthless des- 
potism, and that a majority must be 
watched as jealously as a king, 
38 



TWO FRIENDS 

With his lofty patriotism and his ex- 
traordinary public conscience, Lowell was 
distinctively the Independent in politics. 
He was an American and a republican 
citizen. He acted with parties as every 
citizen must act if he acts at all. But the 
notion that a voter is a traitor to one 
party when he votes with another was 
as ludicrous to him as the assertion that 
it is treason to the White Star steamers 
to take passage in a Cunarder. When 
he would know his public duty, Lowell 
turned within, not without. He listened, 
not for the roar of the majority in the 
street, but for the still small voice in his 
own breast. For while the method of 
republican government is party, its basis 
is individual conscience and common- 
sense. This entire political independence 
Lowell always illustrated. He was born 
in the last days of New England Federal- 
ism. His Uncle, John Lowell, was a 
leader in the long and bitter Federalist 
controversy with John Quincy Adams. 
The Whig dynasty succeeded the Federal 
39 



MEMORIALS OF 

in Massachusetts, but Loweirs first pub- 
lic interest was the antislavery agitation, 
and he identified himself with the Aboli- 
tionists. He retained, however, his indi- 
vidual view, and did not sympathize with 
the policy that sought the dissolution of 
the Union, and which refused to vote. 
In i85o, he says, in a private letter to his 
friend Gay, alluding to some difference 
of opinion with the Antislavery Society, 
'' there has never been a oneness of sen- 
timent," that is to say, complete identity, 
"between me and the Society," and a 
passage in a letter written upon election 
day in November, i85o, illustrates his 
independent position: "I shall vote the 
Union ticket (half Free Soil, half Demo- 
cratic), not from any love of the Demo- 
crats, but because I believe it to be the 
best calculated to achieve some practical 
result. It is a great object to overturn 
the Whig domination, and this seems to 
be the only lever to pry them over with. 
Yet I have my fears that if we get a 
Democratic governor he will play some 
40 



TWO FRIENDS 

trick or other. Timco Danaos et dona 
ferentes, if you will pardon stale Latin to 
Parson Wilbur." 

This election is memorable because it 
overthrew the Whig domination in Mas- 
sachusetts, and made Charles Sumner 
the successor of Daniel Webster in the 
Senate. It restored to the State of Sam- 
uel Adams the same political leadership 
before the Civil War that she had held 
before the Revolution. The Republican 
party, with whose antislavery impulse 
Lowell was in full accord, arose from the 
Whig ruins, and whether in a party or 
out of a party, he was himself the great 
illustration of the political independence 
that he represented and maintained. As 
he allowed no church or sect to dictate 
his religious views or control his daily 
conduct, so he permitted no party to di- 
rect his political action. He was a Whig, 
an Abolitionist, a Republican, a Demo- 
crat, according to his conception of the 
public exigency, and never as a partisan. 
From 1 863 to 1872 he was joint editor, 
41 



MEMORIALS OF 

with his friend Mr. Norton, of the North 
American Review^ and he wrote often of 
pubhc affairs. But his papers all belong 
to the higher politics, which are those of 
the man and the citizen, not of the parti- 
san, a distinction which may be traced in 
Burke's greatest speeches, where it is easy 
to distinguish what is said by Burke, 
the wise and patriotic Englishman, for 
such he really was, from what is said by 
the Whig in opposition to the Treasury 
Bench. 

But whatever his party associations and 
political sympathies, Lowell was at heart 
and by temperament conservative, and 
his patriotic independence in our politics 
is the quality which is always uncon- 
sciously recognized as the truly conserva- 
tive element in the country. In the 
tumultuous excitement of our popular 
elections the real appeal on both sides is 
not to party, which is already committed, 
but to those citizens who are still open to 
reason, and may yet be persuaded. In 
the most recent serious party appeal, the 
42 



TWO FRIENDS 

orator said, " above all things political 
fitness should lead us not to forget that 
at the end of our plans we must meet 
face to face at the polls the voters of the 
land w^ith ballots in their hands demand- 
ing as a condition of the support of our 
party, fidelity and undivided devotion to 
the cause in w^hich we have enlisted 
them." This recognizes an independent 
tribunal which judges party. It implies 
that beside the host who march under 
the party color and vote at the party 
command, there are citizens who may 
or may not wear a party uniform, but 
who vote only at their own individual 
command, and who give the victory. 
They may be angrily classified as politi- 
cal Laodiceans, but it is to them that 
parties appeal, and rightly, because ex- 
cept for this body of citizens, the despot- 
ism of party would be absolute and the 
republic would degenerate into a mere 
oligarchy of "bosses." 

There could be no more signal tribute 
to political independence than that which 
43 



MEMORIALS OF 

was oflfered to Lowell in 1876. He was 
a Republican elector, and the result of 
the election was disputed. A peaceful 
solution of the difference seemed for some 
months to be doubtful, although the con- 
stitution apparently furnished it, for if an 
elector, or more than one, should differ 
from his party and exercise his express 
and unquestionable constitutional right, 
in strict accord with the constitutional in- 
tention, the threatened result might be 
averted. But in the multitude of electors 
Lowell alone was mentioned as one who 
might exercise that right. The sugges- 
tion was at once indignantly resented as 
an insult, because it was alleged to imply 
possible bad faith. But it was not so de- 
signed. It indicated that Lowell was felt 
to be a man who, should he think it to 
be his duty under the indisputable con- 
stitutional provision, to vote differently 
from the expectation of his party, he 
would certainly do it. But those who 
made the suggestion did not perceive that 
he could not feel it to be his duty, be- 
44 



TWO FRIENDS 

cause nobody saw more clearly than he 
that an unwritten law with all the force 
of honor forbade. The constitutional in- 
tention was long since superseded by a 
custom sanctioned by universal approval 
which makes the Presidential elector the 
merest ministeral agent of a party, and 
the most wholly ceremonial figure in our 
political system. 

By the time that he was fifty years old 
Lowell's conspicuous literary accomplish- 
ment and poetic genius, with his political 
independence, courage, and ability had 
given him a position and influence unlike 
those of any other American, and when in 
1877 he was appointed Minister to Spain, 
and in 1880 transferred to England, there 
was a feeling of blended pride and sat- 
isfaction that his country would be not 
only effectively, but nobly represented. 
Mr. Emerson once said of an English 
minister, "He is a charming gentleman, 
but he does not represent the England 
that 1 know." In Lowell, however, no 
man in the world who honored America 
45 



MEMORIALS OF 

and believed in the grandeur of American 
destiny but would find his faith and hope 
confirmed. \o oivc your best, says the 
oriental proverb, is to do your utmost. 
The cominn of such a man, therefore, 
was the highest honor that America could 
pay to iMigland. If we may personify 
America, we can fancy a certain grim 
humor on her part in presenting this son 
of hers to the mother-country, a sapling 
ol the older oak more sinewy and sup- 
ple than the parent stock. No eminent 
American has blended the Cavalier and 
the Puritan traditicMi, the romantic con- 
servatism and the wise radicalism of the 
pjiglish blood in a finer cosmopolitanism 
than Lowell. It was this generous com- 
prehension of both which made him pe- 
culiarly and intelligently at home in Eng- 
land, and which also made him much 
more than his l^xcellency the Ambassa- 
dor of American literature to the Court 
of Shakespeare, as the London Spectator 
called him upon his arrival in London, 
for it made him the representative to 
46 



T w () V n I i: N \^ s 

r^ngland of an American scholarship, a 
wit, an intellectual resource, a complete 
and splendid accomplishment, a social 
j^race and charm, a felicity of public and 
private speech, and a weight of good 
sense, which pleasantly challenged I'^ng- 
land to a continuous and friendly bout in 
which America did not suffer. 

During his oflicial residence in l^^ng- 
land, Lowell seemed to have the fitting 
word for every occasion, and to speak it 
with memorable distinction. If a me- 
morial of Dean Stanley were erected in 
his Chapter House, or of Fielding at 
'I'aunton, or of Coleridge at Westminster 
Abbey, or of (iray at Cambridge, the de- 
sire of literary iMigland turned instinct- 
ively to Lowell as the orator whose voice 
would give the best expression, and 
whose character and renown the greatest 
dignity, to the hour. In Wordsworth's 
i^^ngland, as President of the Wordsworth 
Society, he spoke of the poet with an af- 
fectionate justice which makes his speech, 
with the earlier essay, the finest estimate 
47 



MEMORIALS OF 

of Wordsworth's genius and career ; and 
of Don Quixote he spoke to the Work- 
ingman's College with a poetic appreci- 
ation of the genius of Cervantes and a 
familiarity with Spanish literature which 
was a revelation to British workmen. 
Continuously at public dinners, with con- 
summate tact and singular felicity, he 
spoke with a charm that seemed to dis- 
close a new art of oratory. He did not 
decline even political speech, but of course 
in no partisan sense. His discourse on 
Democracy at Birmingham, in October, 
1884, was not only an event, but an 
event without precedent. He was the 
minister of the American republic to the 
British monarchy, and, as that minister, 
publicly to declare in England the most 
radical democratic principles as the ulti- 
mate logical result of the British Consti- 
tution, and to do it with a temper, an ur- 
banity, a moderation, a precision of state- 
ment, and a courteous grace of humor, 
which charmed doubt into acquiescence 
and amazement into unfeigned admira- 
48 



TWO FRIENDS 

tion and acknowledgment of a great ser- 
vice to political thought greatly done — 
this was an event unknown in the annals 
of diplomacy, and this is what Lowell 
did at Birmingham. 

No American orator has made so clear 
and comprehensive a declaration of the 
essential American principle, or so simple 
a statement of its ethical character. Yet 
not a word of this republican to whom 
Algernon Sydney would have bowed, and 
whom Milton would have blessed, would 
have jarred the tory nerves of Sir Roger 
de Coverley, although no English radical 
was ever more radical than he. The 
frantic French democracy of '93, gnash- 
ing its teeth in the face of royal power, 
would have equality and fraternity if every 
man were guillotined to secure it. The 
American Republic, speaking to mon- 
archical Europe a century later by the 
same voice with which Sir Launfal had 
shown the identity of Christianity with 
human sympathy and succor, set forth in 
the address at Birmingham the truth that 
49 



MEMORIALS O F 

democracy is simply the practical appli- 
cation of moral principle to politics. 
There were many and great services in 
Lowell's life, but none of them all seem 
to me more characteristic of the man 
than when, holding the commission of his 
country and in his own person represent- 
ing its noblest character, standing upon 
soil sacred to him by reverend and ro- 
mantic tradition, his American heart loyal 
to the English impulse which is the im- 
pulse of constitutional liberty, for one 
memorable moment he made monarchical 
England feel for republican America the 
same atfectionatc admiration that she felt 
for him, the republican American. His 
last official words in England show the 
reciprocal feeling : " While I came here 
as a far-off cousin," he said, ''•I feel that 
you are sending me away as something 
like a brother." He died : the poet, the 
scholar, the critic, the public counsel- 
lor, the ambassador, the patriot, and the 
sorrowing voice of the English laureate 
and of the English Queen, the highest 

50 



T W O F H I R N D S 

voices of English literature and political 
power, minglini^ with the universal voice 
of his own country, showed how instinct- 
ively and surely the true American, faith- 
ful to the spirit of Washington and of 
Abraham Lincoln, reconciles and not ex- 
asperates international feeling. 

So varied, so full, and fair is the story 
of Lowell's life, and such services to the 
mind and heart and character of his 
country we commemorate on this hal- 
lowed day. In the golden morning of 
our literature and national life there is 
no more fascinating and inspiring figure. 
His literary achievement, his patriotic 
distinction, and his ennobling influence 
upon the character and lives of generous 
American youth, gave him at last power 
to speak with more authority than any 
living American for the intellect and con- 
science of America. Upon those who 
know him well, so profound was the im- 
pression of his resource and power that 
their words must seem to be mere eulogy. 
All that he did was but the hint of this su- 
5» 



MEMORIALS OF 

pcrb affluence, this comprehensive grasp; 
the overflow of an exhaustless supply, so 
that it seemed to be only incidental, not 
his life s business. Even his literary pro- 
duction was impromptu. " Sir Launfal" 
was the work of two days. The " Fable 
for Critics" was an amusement amid se- 
verer studies. The discourse on Democ- 
racy was largely written upon the way to 
Birmingham. Of no man could it be said 
more truly that 

'' Half his strength he put not forth." 

But that must be always the impression 
of men of so large a mould and of such 
public service that they may be properly 
commemorated on this anniversary. Like 
mountain summits, bright with sunrise, 
that announce the day, such Americans 
are harbingers of the future which shall 
justify our faith, and fulfil the promise of 
America to mankind. In our splendid 
statistics of territorial extension, of the 
swift civilization of the Western world, 
of the miracles of our material invention : 
52 



TWO FRIENDS 

in that vast and smiling landscape, the 
home of a powerful and peaceful people, 
humming with industry and enterprise, 
rich with the charm of every climate, from 
Katahdin that hears the distant roar of 
the Atlantic to the Golden Gate through 
which the soft Pacific sighs, and in every 
form of visible prosperity, we see the re- 
splendent harvest of the mighty sowing, 
two hundred years ago, of the new conti- 
nent with the sifted grain of the old. But 
this is not the picture of national great- 
ness, it is only its glittering frame. In- 
tellectual excellence, noble character, pub- 
lic probity, lofty ideals, art, literature, 
honest politics, righteous laws, conscien- 
tious labor, public spirit, social justice, 
the stern, sel -criticising patriotism which 
fosters only what is worthy of an enlight- 
ened people, not what is unworthy — such 
qualities and achievements, and such 
alone, measure the greatness of a state, 
and those who illustrate them are great 
citizens. They are the men whose lives 
are a glorious service and whose memo- 
53 



MEMORIALS 

ries are a benediction. Among that 
great company of patriots let me to-day, 
reverently and gratefully, blend the name 
of Lowell with that of Washington. 



AN EPISTLE 

TO 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



AN EPISTLE TO 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



" De prodome, 
Des qu'il s'atorne a grant bonte 
Ja n'iert tot dit ne tot conte, 
Que leingue ne puet pas retraire 
Tant d'enor com prodom set faire." 
Crestien de Troies, 
Li Romans dou Chevalier au Lyon, -jSG-ygo. 



1874. 

CURTIS, whose Wit, with Fancy arm in 
arm. 
Masks half its muscle in its skill to 
charm, 
And who so gently can the Wrong expose 
As sometimes to make converts, never foes. 
Or only such as good men must expect, 
Knaves sore with conscience of their own defect, 
I come with mild remonstrance. Ere I start, 
A kindlier errand interrupts my heart. 
And I must utter, though it vex your ears, 
The love, the honor, felt so many years. 

Curtis, skilled equally with voice and pen 

To stir the hearts or mould the minds of men, — 

That voice whose music, for I've heard you sing 

57 



MEMORIALS OF 

Sweet as Casella, can with passion ring, 

That pen whose rapid ease ne'er trips with haste, 

Nor scrapes nor sputters, pointed with good 

taste. 
First Steele's, then Goldsmith's, next it came to 

you. 
Whom Thackeray rated best of all our crew, — 
Had letters kept you, every wreath were yours ; 
Had the World tempted, all its chariest doors 
Had swung on flattered hinges to admit 
Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit; 
At courts, in senates, who so lit to serve? 
And both invited, but you would not swerve. 
All meaner prizes waiving that you might 
In civic duty spend your heat and light. 
Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain 
Refusing posts men grovel to attain. 
Good Man all own you ; what is left me, then. 
To heighten praise with but Good Citizen ? 

But why this praise to make you blush and stare. 

And give a backache to your Easy-Chair? 

Old Crestien rightly says no language can 

Express the worth of a true Gentleman, 

And I agree; but other thoughts deride 

My first intent, and lure my pen aside. 

Thinking of you, I see my firelight glow 

On other faces, loved from long ago, 

Dear to us both, and all these loves combine 

58 



TWO FRIENDS 

With this I send and crowd in every line; 
Fortune with me was in such generous mood 
That all my friends were yours, and all were 

good; 
Three generations come when one I call, 
And the fair grandame, youngest of them all, 
In her own Florida who found and sips 
The fount that fled from Ponce's longing lips. 
How bright they rise and wreath my hearthstone 

round, 
Divine my thoughts, reply without a sound, 
And with them many a shape that memory 

sees. 
As dear as they, but crowned with aureoles 

these ! 
What wonder if, with protest in my thought. 
Arrived, I find 't was only love I brought? 
I came with protest; Memory barred the road 
Till I repaid you half the debt I owed. 

No, 't was not to bring laurels that I came. 
Nor would you wish it, daily seeing fame, 
(Or our cheap substitute, unknown of yore,) 
Dumped like a load of coal at every door, 
Mime and heta^ra getting equal weight 
With him whose toils heroic saved the State. 
But praise can harm not who so calmly met 
Slander's worst word, nor treasured up the debt. 
Knowing, what all experience serves to show, 

59 



MEMORIALS OF 

No nuui can soil us but the mud wc throw. 
You have heard harsher voices and more loud, 
As all must, not sworn liegemen of the crowd, 
And !ar aloof your silent mind could keep 
As when, in heavens with winter-midnight deep, 
The perfect moon hangs thoughtful, nor can 

know 
What hounds her lucent calm drives mad below. 
But to my business, while you rub your eyes 
And wonder how you ever thought me wise. 
Dear friend and old, they say you shake your 

head 
And wish some bitter words of mine unsaid : 
1 wish they might be, — there we are agreed; 
1 hate to speak, still more what makes the need : 
But I must utter what the voice within 
Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin ; 
I blurt ungrateful truths, if so they be. 
That none may need to say them after me. 
'T were my felicity could I attain 
The temperate zeal that balances your brain ; 
But nature still o'erleaps reflection's plan. 
And one must do his service as he can. 
Think vou it were not pleasanter to speak 
Smooth words that leave unflushed the brow and 

cheek? 
To sit, well-dined, with cynic smile, unseen 
In private box, spectator of the scene 
Where men the comedy of life rehearse, 
60 



TWO FRIENDS 

Idly to judge which better and which worse 
Each hireling actor spoiled his worthless part? 
Were it not sweeter with a careless heart, 
In happy commune with the untainted brooks, 
To dream all day, or, walled with silent books, 
To hear nor heed the World's unmeaning noise, 
Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys? 

I love too well the pleasures of retreat 

Safe from the crowd and cloistered from the 

street ; 
The fire that whispers its domestic joy, 
Flickering on walls that knew me still a boy, 
And knew my saintly father; the full days. 
Not careworn from the world's soul-squandering 

ways, 
Calm days that loiter with snow-silent tread. 
Nor break my commune with the undying dead ; 
Truants of Time, to-morrow like to-day. 
That come unbid, and claimless glide away 
By shelves that sun them in the indulgent Past, 
Where Spanish castles, even, were built to last, 
Where saint and sage their silent vigil keep. 
And wrong hath ceased or sung itself to sleep. 
Dear were my walks, too, gathering fragrant 

store 
Of Mother Nature's simple-minded lore : 
I learned all weather-signs of day or night ; 
No bird but I could name him by his flight, 
6i 



MEMORIALS OF 

No distant tree but by his shape was known, 
Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone. 
This learning won by loving looks I hived 
As sweeter lore than all from books derived. 
I know the charm of hillside, field, and wood. 
Of lake and stream, and the sky's downy brood. 
Of roads sequestered rimmed with sallow sod, 
But friends with hardback, aster, goldenrod, 
Or succory keeping summer long its trust 
Of heaven-blue fleckless from the eddying dust : 
These were my earliest friends, and latest too. 
Still unestranged, whatever fate may do. 
For years I had these treasures, knew their worth, 
Estate most real man can have on earth. 
I sank too deep in this soft-stuffed repose 
That hears but rumors of earth's wrongs and 

woes; 
Too well these Capuas could my muscles waste. 
Not void of toils, but toils of choice and taste; 
These still had kept me could I but have quelled 
The Puritan drop that in my veins rebelled. 
But there were times when silent were my books 
As jailers are, and gave me sullen looks. 
When verses palled, and even the woodland path. 
By innocent contrast, fed my heart with wrath, 
And I must twist my little gift of words 
Into a scourge of rough and knotted cords 
Unmusical, that whistle as they swing 
To leave on shameless backs their purple sting. 
62 



TWO FRIENDS 

How slow Time comes ! Gone, who so swift as 

he? 
Add but a year, 't is half a century 
Since the slave's stifled moaning broke my sleep. 
Heard 'gainst my will in that seclusion deep, 
Haply heard louder for the silence there, 
And so my fancied safeguard made my snare. 
After that moan had sharpened to a cry. 
And the cloud, hand-broad then, heaped all our 

sky 
With its stored vengeance, and such thunders 

stirred 
As heaven's and earth's remotest chambers heard, 
I looked to see an ampler atmosphere 
By that electric passion-gust blown clear, 
I looked for this; consider what I see — 
But I forbear, 't would please nor you nor me 
To check the items in the bitter list 
Of all I counted on and all I mist. 
Only three instances I choose from all. 
And each enough to stir a pigeon's gall : 
Office a fund for ballot-brokers made 
To pay the drudges of their gainful trade ; 
Our cities taught what conquered cities feel 
By aediles chosen that they might safely steal ; 
And gold, however got, a title fair 
To such respect as only gold can bear. 
I seem to see this ; how shall I gainsay 
What all our journals tell me every day? 
63 



MEMORIALS OF 

Poured our young martyrs their high-hearted 

blood 
That we might trample to congenial mud 
The soil with such a legacy sublimed? 
Methinks an angry scorn is here well-timed : 
Where hnd retreat ? How keep reproach at bay ? 
Where'er I turn some scandal fouls the way. 

Dear friend, if any man I wished to please, 
'T were surely you whose humor's honied ease 
Flows flecked with gold of thought, whose gen- 
erous mind 
Sees Paradise regained by all mankind. 
Whose brave example still to vanward shines. 
Checks the retreat, and spurs our lagging lines. 
Was I too bitter? Who his phrase can choose 
That sees the life-blood of his dearest ooze? 
I loved my Country so as only they 
Who love a mother tit to die for may; 
I loved her old renown, her stainless fame, — 
What better proof than that I loathed her shame ? 
That many blamed me could not irk me long, 
But, if you doubted, must I not be wrong? 
'T is not for me to answer : this I know, 
That man or race so prosperously low- 
Sunk in success that wrath they cannot feel. 
Shall taste the spurn of parting Fortune's heel ; 
For never land long lease of empire won 
Whose sons sate silent when base deeds were done, 

64 



TWO FRIENDS 



POSTSCRIPT 
1887 



Curtis, so wrote I thirteen years ago, 

Toss't it unfinished by, and left it so; 

Found lately, I have pieced it out, or tried. 

Since time tor callid juncture was denied. 

Some of the verses pleased me, it is true, 

And still were pertinent, — those honoring you. 

These now I offer: take them, if you will. 

Like the old hand-grasp, when at Shady Hill 

We met, or Staten Island, in the days 

When life was its own spur, nor needed praise. 

If once you thought me rash, no longer fear; 

Past my next milestone waits my seventieth year. 

I mount no longer when the trumpets call ; 

My battle-harness idles on the wall, 

The spider's castle, camping-ground of dust. 

Not without dints, and all in front, I trust. 

Shivering sometimes it calls me as it hears 

Afar the charger's tramp and clash of spears ; 

But 't is such murmur only as might be 

The sea-shell's lost tradition of the sea, 

That makes me muse and wonder Where ? and 

When ? 
While from my cliff 1 watch the waves of men 
That climb to break midway their seeming gain, 
And think it triumph if they shake their chain. 
Little I ask of Fate ; will she refuse 
Some days of reconcilement with the Muse? 

65 



M F M O R I A L S O F 

I take my rood again and blow it tree 
Of dusty silence, murmuring, "Sing to me!" 
And, as its stops my curious touch retries, 
The stir of earlier instincts I surprise, — 
Instincts, if less imperious, yet more strong. 
And happy in the toil that ends with song. 

Home am 1 come: not, as 1 hoped might be. 
To the old haunts, too full oi ghosts for me. 
But to the olden dreams that time endears, 
And the loved books that younger grow with 

years ; 
To country rambles, timing with my tread 
Some happier verse that carols in my head, 
Yet all with sense of something vainly mist, 
Oi something lost, but when I never wist. 
How emptv seems to me the populous street. 
One tigure gone I daily loved to meet, — 
The clear, sweet siriger with the crowti ot' snow 
Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below ! 
And, ah, what absence feel I at my side. 
Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide. 
What sense of diminution in the air 
Once so inspiring, Emerson not there ! 
But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet 
Lessen like sound oi' friends' departing feet. 
And death is beautiful as teet of friend 
Coming with welcome at our iourney's end ; 
For me Fate gave, whaie'er she else denied, 
66 



T W O F i< I i: N J) s 

A nature sloping to the southern side; 

I thank her for it, though when clouds arise 

Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. 

I muse upon the margin of the sea, 

Our common pathway to the new To Be, 

Watching the sails, that lessen more and more, 

Of good and beautiful embarked before; 

With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear 

Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere, 

Whose friendly-peopled shore 1 sometimes see. 

By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me. 

Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun. 

My moorings to the past snap one by one. 



iHi-: mm: and chakacii^k 

OF- 

(]K()\<(]\': WIIJJAM CdKTIS 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BY 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON, 

AT ASHFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 
THE TOWN HALL, AUGUST I2TH, 
1896, ON THE OCCASION OF THE 
DEDICATION OF A BRONZE TABLET 
BEARING AN INSCRIPTION IN HONOR 
OF MR. CURTIS. 



THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



NO blessing can befall a com- 
munity greater than the 
choice of it by a good man for 
his home ; for the example of 
such a man sets a standard of conduct, 
and his influence, unconsciously not less 
than consciously exerted, tends to lift 
those who come within its circle to his 
own level. In the quiet annals of this 
little town there are many incidents of 
local and personal interest ; but the inci- 
dent of chief importance to its inhabitants 
of this generation and of coming times 
was its selection in 1865, by George Wil- 
liam Curtis, for his summer home. Hither 
for twenty-seven summers he came to find 
refreshment among these hills and woods, 
to show himself the best of neighbors, and 
to exhibit those social virtues and charms 
73 



MEMORIALS OF 

which would have made him beloved and 
admired by any society which he might 
have chosen to adorn. 

It is well that the Club named in his 
honor should set up a tablet to commemo- 
rate his residence in Ashheld, in this hall 
where his presence has been so familiar, 
and where his voice has been so often 
heard. It is well that the town should 
accept this tablet, to be sacredly preserved 
so long as its own ever-renewed life shall 
last, as a permanent record of great ser- 
vices rendered to it. It is well that we, 
the town's people, should meet to dedi- 
cate this tablet, the inscription upon 
which records our lasting and grateful 
affection for the good man whose name it 
bears. 

Happily there are many men in the 
world, even in a little community like this, 
whom we, speaking in familiar phrase, 
should call, and rightly call, good men, — 
men who perform fairly well the simple 
duties of life ; who try to be, or, at least 
intend to be, estimable husbands, fathers, 
74 



TWO FRIENDS 

sons, brothers, neif^hbors; but there are 
few anywhere whose goodness stands, 
year in, year out, the wear and tear of 
common days, whose virtues are never 
dimmed by slow-collecting rust, or by 
the dust which rises from even worthy 
toil and unavoidable cares. So, too, it 
often happens that among many virtues 
the one is lacking which is required to 
give savor to all the rest ; that some black 
drop in the blood betrays itself in morose- 
ness ; that feebleness of imagination (the 
great defect of man) shows itself in fail- 
ure of sympathetic consideration for those 
who most stand in need of patient and 
tender regard. 

No, the good man, in the full sense of 
the word, the man whose virtues never 
suffer eclipse, and whose goodness is not 
merely good, but delightful, is one of the 
rarest gifts of Heaven. Happiest and 
most welcome of men is the good man 
whose temperament and disposition com- 
bine to make him as pleasant as he is 
good ; whose virtues arc the sweet flow- 
75 



MEMORIALS OF 

ering of his nature, trained by experience 
and perfected by self-discipline ; whose 
character is based on simpHcity of heart 
and who fulfils the New Commandment 
because for him it is the natural mode 
of self-expression. And if to such a man 
be added great gifts alike of body and of 
soul, the fine form expressing the fine 
spirit, the sweet voice attuned to the 
sweet disposition ; if in him outward 
grace be the type of grace of mind, and 
physical vigor the emblem of intellectual 
power ; if he be endowed with poetic im- 
agination, quickening the moral and in- 
vigorating the intellectual elements of 
his nature ; and if all be crowned by a 
spirit of devotion to public interests, — 
then we have such a man as he who fills 
our memories and our hearts to-day. 

You have seen him in his daily walk 
during almost thirty years ; can you recall 
one act, one word of his that was not 
friendly and pleasant? I, who knew him 
from youth to age, I, whose life was 
blessed by his friendship for forty-three 
76 



TWO FRIENDS 

years, find in my memory of him such 
pleasantness that my words come short 
to express it. No one could meet him 
without being better for the meeting. 
" He makes you feel good," an old Ash- 
field man said of him. 

In his relations with others, whether in 
private life or in public affairs, he was 
singularly exemplary; I mean he set an 
example of simple excellence to each of us, 
fitted to the various needs and conditions 
of our lives. And yet his modesty was 
such, and his simplicity so entire, that he 
walked among us quite unconscious of the 
virtue which proceeded from him, never 
assuming an air of superiority, or claim- 
ing the distinction which was his due. 

Seldom has there been so general a 
favorite as he, and seldom a man who 
received more flattery with less harm to 
the sincerity of his nature. When he 
returned home from Europe in 1850, a 
youth of twenty-six, with keen perceptions 
of the delights of life, with accomplish- 
ments and graces and tastes that opened 

17 



M i: M O RIALS O K 

every door to him, with Uterary ambitions 
which were soon to be qratitied by the 
brilliant success o( his tirst bt)ok, with the 
youth of both sexes crowding round him 
at Newport, at Saratoi^a, at New York, 
to tolK>w his aliurini; lead, and to catch 
tVom him, it thev mii^ht, the secret of his 
charm, — at this time he stood at the part- 
ing o{' the ways. As Izaak Walton said 
of his friend. Sir Henry Wotton, ''His 
company seemed to be one of the delights 
of mankind." He was flattered and ca- 
ressed, and for a time he lloated on the 
swift current of pleasure. It would have 
been so easy to yield to the temptations 
of the world I But his pure, youthful 
heart cherished other ideals. He heard 
the voice of duty saying, "Come, follow 
me;" and he obeyed. The path along 
which she led was difficult. The times 
were dark. He recognized the claim 
which, in a democracy like ours, the 
country has on every one of her sons for 
the best service which he can render. 
He had a most public soul, and he gave 



T W () \' \i I !•: N I) s 

himself, without reserve, to the cause of 
justice, of freedom, and of popular intel- 
ligence. 

His first books, records of impressions 
of PZastern travel, had shown that he 
possessed literary gifts of a high order, 
with a style fluent, facile and elegant, 
capable of conveying clearly the images 
of a sensitive and poetic spirit. And the 
books which followed them gave proof of 
his delicate sensibilities, and quick and dis- 
criminating perceptions. They showed 
him to he a lover of nature and of the 
arts, a shrewd observer of men, an acute 
critic of life, a delicate and tender humor- 
ist. The way of simple literary distinc- 
tion lay open to him. He felt its charm. 
His nature was averse to conflict. I>ut 
the times called for strenuous action, and 
with full con.sciousness of the attractions 
of the ease and pleasure which he was 
relinquishing, he turned from the pursuit 
of literature as an end in itself, and de- 
voted his literary gifts and accomplish- 
ments to political and patriotic service. 
79 



MEMORIALS OF 

In August, 185G, just forty years ago, 
at the height of the struggle between the 
forces of freedom and those of slavery 
before the war, Mr. Curtis, then thirty- 
two years old, delivered, at Wesleyan 
University at Middletown, Connecticut, an 
oration on "The Duty of the American 
Scholar/' It was at once a profession of 
faith and an appeal to the young scholars 
of the land to be true to those moral 
principles which, in a period of material 
prosperity, are apt to be subordinated to 
mere temporary interests. It was the 
first of that long series of speeches which 
secured to Mr. Curtis a place in the front 
rank of orators. He had spoken often 
before in public, but on this occasion he 
found and manifested his unequivocal vo- 
cation as a master of the art of persuasive 
and pow^erful eloquence. To all her other 
gifts to him Nature had added those of 
the orator. He was of a fine presence and 
easy grace of carriage, tall and straight; he 
had strongly marked and expressive fea- 
tures, with the masculine nose and long 
80 



TWO F R I P: N D S 

upper lip that mark the born public 
speaker. His voice (it still echoes in our 
ears) was of wide compass, sweet and rich 
in tone, perfectly under control, and its 
harmony was enhanced by his free bear- 
ing and efTective gesture. Not often has 
a finer instrument of speech been vouch- 
safed to a man. 

"Do you ask me," said he, in his dis- 
course at Middletown, — "do you ask me 
our duty as scholars? Gentlemen, as the 
American scholar is a man, and has a 
voice in his own government, so his inter- 
est in political affairs must precede all 
others. ... He must recognize that the 
intelligent exercise of political rights, 
which is a privilege in a monarchy, is a 
duty in a republic. If it clash with his 
ease, his retirement, his taste, his study, 
let it clash, but let him do his duty. The 
course of events is incessant, and when 
the good deed is slighted the bad deed is 
done. Young scholars, young Ameri- 
cans, young men, we are all called upon 
to do a great duty. Nobody is released 



MEMORIALS OF 

from it. It is a work to be done by hard 
strokes everywhere. Brothers, the call 
has come to us." 

From the date of this oration to the 
end of his life Mr. Curtis never put off 
the harness or relinquished the arms of 
public service. He took an active part in 
the local politics of the county in which 
he lived, he became a prominent figure in 
the politics of the State of New York, he 
exercised a powerful influence by voice 
and by pen in shaping the policy of the 
Republican party in its best years, as 
well as of the national administration. 
When the war came, that war which to 
the generation born since its close 
seems so remote, but which to us, who 
lived through it, is in a sense always 
present, giving poignancy to the disap- 
pointment of many of the high-raised 
hopes of that heroic time, — when the 
war came, Curtis threw himself into 
the contest with passionate zeal, — pas- 
sionate, but not blind or irrational. In 
the bitter sacrifices of the war he shared. 
82 



TWO FRIENDS 

In 1862 one of his younger brothers fell 
dead at Fredericksburg, at the head of 
his regiment, thus gloriously ending a 
stainless life of twenty-six years. His 
brother-in-law, the fair young Colonel 
Robert Shaw, dying at the head of his 
black regiment in the assault on Fort 
Sumter, and "buried with his niggers," 
became the immortal type to all genera- 
tions of Americans of the hero of human 
brotherhood. Of the work which had to 
be done at home, no less essential than 
that in the field, no man did more, or 
more eflfectively, than Curtis. As politi- 
cal editor of Harper's Weekly^ he exer- 
cised an influence not second to that of 
any other public writer of the time in 
shaping and confirming popular opinion 
and sentiment. Nor did his service in 
this respect end with the war. 

Sound in judgment, with clear foresight, 
with convictions based upon immutable 
principles, absolutely free from motives 
of jealousy or ignoble ambition, with no 
personal ends to serve, neither seeking 
83 



M i: M () K I A L S () 1'^ 

nor dcsirini; public ollicc or other station 
than that which he liekl, lie acquired not 
only i^eneral public conlideiice and esteem, 
but secured also the respect of those who 
most widely dilVered from him. No man 
of such inlluence, especially with the rea- 
sonable class of his fellow citizens, could, 
indeed, escape the enmity of selllsh politi- 
cians whose interests he opposed and 
Ui^^ainst wdiose schemes he contended. 
More than once he became the object of 
bitter denunciation. He was charged 
with weakness, with folly, with treachery 
to his jxirty. The charges never dis- 
turbed his serenity, nor drew from him a 
reply of jKission or of jiersonal retort. 
He was indeed not open to any attack 
that could break in on the quiet of his 
soul or ruille the evenness ol his temper. 
I (.lo not believe that in any controversy 
in which he was eui^aged lie ever used an 
ungenerous \\o\\\ or cast a personal im- 
putation upon his opp(Mient. He did not 
spare the base, the treacherous, and the 
malignant, but he never dealt an unfair 
«4 



TWO FRIENDS 

blow, or in the heat of conflict forgot 
"the law in calmness made/' Words- 
worth, in the " Character of the Happy 
Warrior," has drawn the portrait of our 
friend, as one — 

" Whose high endeavors are an inward light 
That makes the path before him always bright. 

Who comprehends his trust, and to the same 
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ; 
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait 
For wealth, or honors, or tor worldly state ; 
Whom they must follow ; on whose head must 

fall, 
Like showers of manna, if they come at all : 
Whose powers shed round him in the com- 
mon strife. 
Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
A constant influence, a peculiar grace." 

As he, in fine, who — 

" Plays in the many games of life, that one 
Where what he most doth value must be won." 

It was not, however, to service only as 
a political writer and speaker that Mr. 
Curtis devoted himself during his long 
85 



M i: M () 111 A I. S O F 

ycais of incessant toil. Month after 
month, iVoni tlie l']asy Cvliairof ''Harper's 
Magazine/' he was scatterin*;- broadcast 
seeds of civiHzation which took root far 
and wiile. In this loni;- series of brief es- 
says treating of a thousand topics, always 
fresli, always timely, the grace and skill 
o[' his literaiy art were abundantly dis- 
played, lie found here a free field for 
the expression o( his humor, his senti- 
ment, his fancy, his good sense, his criti- 
cal judgment, his strong moral conyic- 
tions, his wide sympathies. Manners and 
cust(Miis, arts, letters, passing events, life 
and death, all the concerns oi' men, fur- 
nished subjects for the wise and pleasant 
discourse in which his own delightful 
nature was lielightfully mirrored. But 
ephemeral in toj^ic and slight in fabric as 
were the most of these little papers, they 
were more than merely literary essays, — 
they were bodies of dc>ctrine ; and it would 
be hard to estimate too highly the inllu- 
ence they exerted in refining the taste, 
quickening the n\oral sensibilities, and 
86 



TWO \< n \ !•: N n s 

raising the standard of fcclin^'^ in a multi- 
tude of readers wlio stood in need (d tliat 
culture which their brief lessons were 
eminently fitted to impart. It was an 
incstimahle benefit to many a youth ol 
sScant opportunities for association with 
the best, to have this monthly intercourse 
with such a teacher. 

Conscious of his power and of his in- 
fluence, aware that from his editor's seat 
he was helping to shape the j)olicy of 
parties, to mould the character and to de- 
termine the destiny of the nation, it is not 
strange, however surprising to men of a 
lower order, that Mr. Curtis never sought 
for public office, and was never tempted by 
repeated offers of high station in the pub- 
lic service. Most men would have found 
it too hard to resist the charm of distinc- 
tion, and of opportunity for the display of 
talent upon the conspicuous field which 
these offers opened to him. The allure- 
ment was, indeed, great, but it was not 
overmastering, lie comj)ared one duty 
with another, and he chose that for which 
«7 



M V M (^ R 1 A 1. S O F 

experience liad proved his eoinpetenoe. 
lie was helped in hisehoiee bv his prefer- 
ence torsii\iple nuules ot lite, and tor quiet 
domestic joys and social pleasutes. He 
loved his home and his tViends too well to 
quit tliem tor stram^e couits and brilliant 
comjiany. And so trom vear to vear he 
maintained tranquilly his industrious, 
laborious, unseltish, useful career, with 
steadv increase ot his poweis, with sieadv 
i^rowth in the respect and regard in which 
he was held by the public, and with the 
ever-decpenini; love ot his triends. 

Ot all the manv public questions of im- 
portance which claimed attention in the 
vears tollowinj^ the war, none was o( 
•greater concern than the retorm oi the 
civil service. The '* spoils svstem " had 
become rooted in the practice of the i^ov- 
ernment, both local and national, and in 
the popular theory o( its administration. 
This svstem, bv which public otVice was 
held to be not a place o( trust to be 
awarded onlv to such as were competent 
bv character and intellii^eiu'e to discharge 
SS 



'I w o I ' j< I I-: N 1) s 

its duties, but a place ofemolument ^iven 
as reward or incentive for partisan or 
personal services, — this debasing and cor- 
rupting system had in the course of years 
become the source of evils which threat- 
ened the very foundation of our institu- 
tions. One of the least of these evils was 
the lowering of the quality of the public 
service and the degradation of the charac- 
ter of the public servant. To hold public 
office was no longer a badge of honor, 
but a token of loss of personal indepen- 
dence and a badge of servitude to a patron. 
']"he system poisoned the moral springs 
of political effort and action; it perverted 
the nature and the results of elections ; it 
fostered corruption in every department of 
the government, and tended to vitiate the 
popular conception of the duty of a citi- 
zen in a republic, and of the very ends for 
which the government exists. To con- 
tend against this system, intrenched as it 
was behind the lines of long custom, de- 
fended by the host of selfish, unprincipled, 
and ignorant politicians, and openly sup- 



M E M O R I A L S OF 

ported by both the great parties alike, 
seemed an ahiiost hopeless task. But Mr. 
Curtis did not shrink from the contest. 
He had faith in the i^ood sense of the mass 
of the people, if once they could be roused 
from their temper of optimistic inditVer- 
ence. The ti^ht had already be^un when 
he entered it, but he had scarcely entered 
it before he became its leader. 

In 1S71 he was appointed by President 
Grant upon the commission to form rules 
for admission to the public service and 
regulations to promote its efficiency. He 
was made chairman of the commission, 
and their report — the basis of all that has 
been done in the establishment of the 
reform — was mainly his work. But the 
opposition to the project of reform was 
strenuous, was persistent. The aims of 
the reformers were often baf!led, often de- 
feated. But they were not disheartened. 
In 1880 the New York Civil Service Re- 
form Association was founded ; in 1881, 
the National League for the same end, — 
and of both was xMr. Curtis chosen presi- 
90 



T w o F H I r: N D s 

dent. In both he held this oflice till his 
death. The duties were arduous, and 
were performed by him with consum- 
mate fideh'ty and ability. He was a mag- 
nificent standard-bearer. Slowly, but 
steadily, the cause advanced. He did not 
live to see its triumph, but he never 
doubted that it would win the victory. 

It was in the summer of 1864 that Mr. 
Curtis first came to Ashfield. He spent 
a few days here as my guest; but he saw 
enough of the pleasant village, and the 
beautiful country in which it lies, to in- 
duce him to come back to it with his 
family the next summer, and thenceforth 
to make it his summer home. Resident 
here during a good portion of each year, 
for almost the full term of a generation, 
his life became closely associated with that 
of this community, and Ashfield has the 
right to claim him as her child by adoption 
and his own choice. 

The last thirty years, which have wit- 
nessed perhaps greater changes in the 
world than any other similar period ever 
91 



MEMORIALS OF 

knew, have brought many changes to our 
little town. When Mr. Curtis first came 
here it was more secluded and remote and 
more tranquil than it is to-day. It possessed 
much of the character of an earlier time. 
It had, indeed, already lost a good part of 
its population and something of that inde- 
pendence of the rest of the world which, 
if the ten-mile-square township had been 
detached from the earth in the earlier years 
of the century, and sent spinning in space 
in an orbit of its own, would have enabled 
it to maintain itself comfortably on its own 
resources, mental and material. The sev- 
enty varieties of industry which had then 
been practised by its people had already 
diminished by more than half. There was 
hardly a farmhouse in which the whirr 
of the spinning-wheel and the clash of the 
loom was still heard. 

Its little trade with the outer world was 
still carried on mainly by the numerous ped- 
dlers, who resorted to Mr. Bement's store, 
as a centre from which to draw supplies 
to replenish the stock of their inexhausti- 

q2 



TWO FRIENDS 

ble carts. The old-fashioned tavern, with 
its long tradition of good cheer, with its 
sanded floor and hospitable bar-room, 
afforded accommodation to a few travel- 
lers ; and from its stables, early every 
morning, the coach set out on its slow 
journey along the variously picturesque 
road to the railroad at South Deerfield, 
whence it returned late in the afternoon. 
The invasion of summer boarders had not 
begun. The Academy was in a condition 
of suspended animation, and its old build- 
ing was sadly out of repair. There was 
no public library, and the subscription 
library which had once existed, existed no 
longer. The two Orthodox churches, sep- 
arated only by the width of the street, but 
divided from each other by the gulf of a 
bitter quarrel of long standing, rang their 
rival bells in harsh discord every Sunday, 
and each congregation prayed for good- 
will on earth, and devoted their schis- 
matic brethren to eternal damnation. The 
Hoosac Tunnel, which was to open a way 
toward the sunset, was hardly begun, and 
93 



MEMORIALS OF 

many a year was to pass before the thread 
of electric wire should tie Ashfield to the 
restless world beyond. For most of the 
people life was monotonous, for many of 
them it was, as it still is, a life of few 
active pleasures, and of heavy toil ; and 
many a man and woman fretting against 
the narrow limits of the farm, and restless 
with the dreams of a wider life, were 
tempted to bid their little native town 
farewell, and to try their fortunes in the 
world which they saw in vision from the 
mountain-top. 

But Ashfield is a place where Nature is 
beautiful, and where man, even yet, has 
done but little to deface her beauty. Mr. 
Curtis, lover of nature and of country 
pleasures, was attracted by the loveliness 
of the region ; and, tired of the bustle, the 
interruptions, the noise, the multifarious 
distractions of cities, was no less attracted 
by its tranquillity and repose. He did 
not come here to spend an idle and indo- 
lent vacation. There was no interruption 
in his work as editor of a journal, or as 
94 



TWO FRIENDS 

active and leading participant in political 
aflFairs. But though he sought no exemp- 
tion from labor here, he found refreshment 
in the fields and woods and in the placid 
flow of the days ; he had the welcome so- 
ciety of a few familiar friends, and he en- 
joyed the easy and simple relations which 
he speedily established with his neigh- 
bors. They, in their turn, so soon as 
their natural suspicion of a strange fa- 
mous settler among them was overcome, 
learned to hold him in affectionate respect. 
They, — you, — all learned to know him as 
one of the friendliest and most simple- 
hearted of men, ready to take share in your 
interests, eager to promote every object 
for the benefit of the community, helpful 
in difficulty, a reconciler of differences 
among neighbors, a wise and sympathetic 
counsellor ; kind always and generous, 
for— 

" July was in his sunny heart, 
October in his liberal hand." 

Who that has lived in Ashfield during 
these years whose life has not been en- 
95 



MEMORIALS OF 

rlched by his presence and his words ? 
Who that attended them will forget the 
autumn lectures which he gave annually 
to increase the means for the purchase of 
books for the library? Who that heard 
his speeches at the Academy dinners, but 
must remember them as the most eloquent 
discourse to which he ever listened. Never, 
not before the most brilliant audiences, 
not before the most crowded and excited 
assembly, did Mr. Curtis speak with more 
splendid and impressive use of his great 
power than in this little, bare hall of ours, 
before the scant audience of three or four 
hundred plain people. I recall especially 
two occasions when he rose to such heights 
of noble and impassioned speech as I never 
knew him to surpass, — once when, indig- 
nant with the base attacks made on Mr. 
Lowell, he spoke of the character of the 
true American, and in words that came 
glowing from his heart, set forth his friend 
as the living exemplar of that character ; 
and once, when having himself been ex- 
posed to slander, to abuse, and, worst of 
96 



TWO FRIENDS 

all, to the misconstruction and misjudg- 
ment of friends on whom he had relied, 
he depicted with manly self-assertion the 
duty and the position of the independent 
in politics, in religion, or in whatever 
field of party strife. These were memor- 
able occasions, and it is well that they and 
others like them, which have made this 
modest hall one of the sacred buildings of 
the Commonwealth, should be commem- 
orated by a permanent record of him 
upon its walls. 

Of all the pleasures and benefits which 
the retirement of Ashfield afforded him 
there was perhaps none which Mr. Curtis 
more highly valued than the opportunity 
which the comparative leisure that he 
found here gave to him for studious read- 
ing, — such reading as might keep the 
springs of his imagination fresh and full, 
and might increase and perfect his use- 
fulness as a public counsellor. " Histories," 
says Bacon, " make men wise," and Cur- 
tis was a wide reader of them. Few men 
had a more exact acquaintance with the 
97 



MEMORIALS OF 

political history ofthe United States, and 
he was hardly less familiar with that of 
Old England than of New. But he did 
not confine himself to these, and the vol- 
umes of Gibbon and of Motley stood as 
near to his hand as those of Hume, Ma- 
caulay, or Bancroft. Important as the 
history of the United States may be, he 
knew that it was not to be correctly un- 
derstood or rightly interpreted except as 
a small fragment of that of mankind, and 
especially of that of the great English 
race. He knew that such instruction in our 
own history as is too often given in our 
public schools was a source, not so much 
of useful knowledge, as of dangerous 
ignorance, illusion, and conceit. No people 
can be exclusively bred on its own history 
without falling into childish and barbaric 
misconceptions as to its true place in the 
ranks of civilized communities, and without 
losing the benefit of those lessons, drawn 
from the long, sad experience of man- 
kind, upon the laying to heart of which 
its own progress and security depend. 



TWO FRIENDS 

But Mr. Curtis' days here were not 
wholly studious. The morning was for 
work; the afternoon for a walk with 
familiar companions, or for a long drive 
over roads, each one of which possesses 
its special charm of landscape, — it may be 
the wide open view of hill and dale to 
where Monadnock rises on the northern 
horizon, a pyramid of Nature, the mon- 
ument of solitary past ages to which the 
pyramids of man seem but of yesterday, 
or it may be where the shady road runs 
between bright meadows whose walls are 
the venerable records in stone of the 
hard, laborious lives of the fathers of the 
town. 

How many are the happy evenings that 
I recall of gay or serious talk, of poetry, 
of music, of all the various pleasures 
of friendliest social intercourse, and then 
the lighted lantern, and the late Good- 
Night ! 

It was a wholesome and simple, pleas- 
ant life. And controlling it all, diffused 
through it, was the sweet, high, gener- 
99 



MEMORIALS OF 

ous spirit of him who was its central fig- 
ure, loving and beloved of young and old. 

" That comely face, that manly brow, 
That cordial hand, that bearing free, 
I see them still, I see them now. 
Shall always see ! 

"And what but gentleness untired, 
And what but noble feeling warm, 
Wherever shown, howe'er inspired 
Is grace, is charm?" 

The path between his door and mine 
is no longer worn as of old, the summer 
has lost its chief delight, but Ashfield is 
forever dearer for its memories of him ; 
and not in my own heart only, but in all 
our hearts, fellow-townsmen, the remem- 
brance shall abide to quicken what is best 
within us, to make us kinder and pleasant- 
er to each other, more public-spirited, 
better citizens and better men. 

Even while he was alive and walking 
with us his figure had an ideal stamp. 
There was no need of the haze of time 
and remoteness to give nobility to its out- 
lines, or to bring it into the eye and pros- 

lOO 



TWO FRIENDS 

pect of our souls apparelled in more pre- 
cious habit than it wore in daily life. The 
actual man, our neighbor, editor of 
" Harper's Weekly," member of political 
conventions, occupied, as we all are, with 
commonplace cares and duties, modest, 
simple as the simplest, one of ourselves, — 
he, even in the prose of life, was a poetic 
figure, bearing himself above the dust 
and worry of the earth, and living as a 
denizen of a world, such as that place 
which Plutarch says the poets feign for 
the abode of the gods, — a secure and quiet 
seat, free from all hazards and commo- 
tions, untroubled with storms, unclouded, 
and illumined with a soft serenity and a 
pure light such as befits a blessed and im- 
mortal nature. 

Four years have passed since the death 
of Mr. Curtis. The sense of personal be- 
reavement and of public loss does not grow 
less as time goes on. New questions have 
arisen and new perils threaten us. The 
times have grown darker. No lover of 
his country can look forward without 



MEMORIALS OF 

anxiety. At this moment of popular de- 
lusion, of confusion of parties, of ex- 
cited passions ; at this moment, when 
only a choice of evils seems to lie be- 
fore us, — we long to hear (alas! that we 
should long in vain) that clear voice of 
prudent and sagacious counsel to which 
we were wont to listen for instruction and 
guidance, enforcing upon the intelligence 
and the conscience of the people the truth 
that national safety and prosperity rest 
securely only upon the foundation of 
moral rectitude. 

The perils that confront us are not 
transient, nor to be overcome by a spas- 
modic effort and the result of an elec- 
tion. The infuriate clamor for war, the 
eager cry for free silver and fiat money, 
the demand for subsidy under the name 
of protection, may be suppressed : but 
they are only the symptoms of disease, 
and to suppress them is no more a rem- 
edy for the disease, than to check a fit 
of coughing by an opiate is the remedy 
for consumption. The disease is the 

102 



TWO P^ R I E N D S 

ignorance and the consequent lack of pub- 
lic morality of a large part of the people 
of our republic. To contend with this 
ignorance, to enlighten it, and in enlight- 
ening it to vanquish it, is our task. A 
long, a difficult, an uncertain fight lies 
before us. It is the fight of civilization 
against barbarism in America. It is the 
nev^ form of the "good old fight," fought 
ever in different ages under different 
names. 

I was wrong just now in saying that 
we could not hear the voice of our friend. 
He speaks : " Whatever in human nature is 
hopeful, generous, aspiring, — the love of 
God and trust in man, — is arrayed on one 
side.'' On that side he stood among the 
foremost. On that side let us stand. 



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